Table Of ContentE n s e m b l a n c e
The Transnational Genealogy
of Esprit de Corps
Luis de Miranda
Ensemblance
A happy phrase is sometimes coined, so humanly expressive that barriers of
language are swept aside and like music it becomes a universal sentiment. To
the French we are indebted for such an expression, ‘esprit de corps’, which our
English tongue has adopted and naturalized because it visualizes, as no idiom
of our own does, the essence of co-operation [. . .] In proportion as ‘esprit de
corps’ becomes a motivating force in men’s lives do they transcend the narrow
bounds of selfishness and become social beings, for it brings into action forces
potent to lift men’s thoughts from their own petty affairs to the contemplation
of wider horizons.
John Scofield Rowe, ‘Practical Philosophies: Esprit de Corps’,
The Monroe Monitor, 9 August 1929
I do not care what methods a philosopher (or anybody else) may use so long as
he has an interesting problem, and so long as he is sincerely trying to solve it.
Among the many methods which he may use – always depending, of course,
on the problem in hand – one method seems to me worth mentioning. It
is a variant of the (at present unfashionable) historical method. It consists,
simply, in trying to find out what other people have thought and said about the
problem in hand: why they had to face it: how they formulated it: how they
tried to solve it. This seems to me important because it is part of the general
method of rational discussion.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
Preface to the First English Edition, 1959
Ensemblance
The Transnational Genealogy of
Esprit de Corps
Luis de Miranda
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Esprit de Corps: A Timeline viii
Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of
Esprit de Corps 1
1 Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the
Eighteenth Century 33
2 ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps 61
3 ‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de
Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 87
4 The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early
Nineteenth-Century France 112
5 Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and
Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 140
6 The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century 166
7 The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the
Twentieth Century 194
Conclusion: Ensemblance 230
Bibliography 244
Index 276
vi
Acknowledgements
I wish, first, to thank the French language for its suggestive beauty. For as long as
I can remember, the word esprit has always fascinated me because of its numerous
nuances, mind being only one possible translation. The body, corps in French, is
all too often considered as the antonym of mind. To see esprit and corps united in
a globally recognised phrase was intriguing enough for me to spend several years
wondering why and how.
My research was facilitated by institutional and human goodwill. My gratitude
goes first and foremost to two academic institutions. I was able to conduct this
extensive research mostly thanks to generous funding from the University of
Edinburgh. I then moved from Scotland to Sweden, where a postdoctoral posi-
tion at Örebro University offered me the time I needed to finalise the typescript.
Thanks to Örebro’s funding, the introduction of the present book is accessible as
an open resource in partnership with Edinburgh University Press.
Institutions are represented by human beings; at the University of Edinburgh,
I felt inspired by the encouraging welcome of Professor Marion Schmid and
by regular and piquant Socratic dialogue with Professor Peter Dayan. More
recently and at a distance, Professor Robin Howells (University of London)
was an attentive reader of these pages, frowning upon a few Gallicisms, though
sparing the most obvious one. Professor James Livesey (University of Dundee)
cast an encouraging critical eye on the final version of the manuscript. Parts of
the introduction and the third chapter have inspired two articles I authored for
the journal Global Intellectual History: I warmly thank its editor-in-chief Professor
Richard Whatmore (University of St Andrews) for accepting these echoes, as
well as for his comments on an earlier version of the work.
My research on esprit de corps was also, incidentally, a personal reflection
on the merits and pitfalls of academic institutionalisation. A typical product of
rebellious French individualism, I believed for a long time that institutions could
lead to uncreative groupthink: if I was to become an original author – I thought
in my twenties and thirties – I had to avoid any kind of affiliation, and so I did
for many years of precarious, reckless, consuming but exhilarating independence.
I changed my mind in my early forties partly because I felt robust enough to
find a good balance between freedom and incorporation. I had written a few
Acknowledgements vii
unacademic essays and novels in French and I felt attracted by a new life and
new thoughts expressed in a new language – this is the first book I have written
directly in English. Because many universities around the world are threatened by
the spirit of capitalist managerialism, it is never too late to join the transnational
academic body in order to try and defend as far as possible the idealistic ethos of
knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
I am grateful to Linda Ayres, supportive in many ways in the crucial early
stages of this project, and to my young daughter Svea who was kind enough
to remind me of how five little monkeys jumping on the bed can dangerously
indulge in group entrainment. Learning to be a father during the first years of
research that led to this book distracted me from the follies of excessive theoret-
ical speculation.
Finally, my extended warm thanks go to commissioning editor Carol
Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press, with whom I had a few inspiring chats
around George Square when this book was but a possibility, and to Gerald Moore,
Sam Coombes, Jean-Sébastien Hongre, Kirsty Woods, James Dale, Andrew Kirk
and the numerous people – including the defunct authors quoted in the following
pages – who have led to the slow and patient production of this monograph.
In what follows, the translations from French primary sources are almost always
mine, and when not, the translators are gratefully cited – I also wish to thank
Edinburgh University Press for allowing me to keep the original French quota-
tions in the endnotes of each chapter for the benefit of francophone readers. Like
the writing process leading to it, the genealogy of the notion of esprit de corps
is a process of correspondences, variations, counter-interpretations, alliances,
slippery metamorphoses, fears and dreams – a reflection, via one of the most influ-
ential Gallicisms in modern history, of our contemporary worries about identity,
dependence and liberation.
Last but not least, and by anticipation, I thank the readers – mes semblables,
mes frères! – for their patient engagement with the text.
viii Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
All quotations and citations below will be referenced, developed and contextual-
ised in the following chapters.
1656–58 Pascal writes Différence entre l’esprit de géometrie et l’esprit de finesse.
1662 Louis XIV’s historiographer René Bary publishes L’esprit de cour.
1721 Publication of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, in which the author
mocks the esprit du corps of the Académie française.
1732 Lettres de Nedim Coggia, by Germain de Saint-Foix, praises the esprit
de corps of the French musketeers.
1752 D’Alembert, in the Encyclopédie, criticises the anti-national esprit du
corps of the Jesuits.
1755 Voltaire, in the Encyclopédie, distinguishes esprit de corps from its
supposedly worse version, esprit de parti. In the same volume, Diderot,
more critical, suggests that the Encyclopaedists must avoid catching
the esprit de corps by remaining objective.
1755 Lord Chesterfield, a friend of Voltaire, introduces ‘esprit de corps’
into the English language to describe the natural ‘biased conduct’ and
‘inflamed zeal’ in closed societies, a fatal aspect of ‘human nature’.
1762 Rousseau explains in L’Emile: ‘It is not only in the military that one
acquires the esprit de corps, and its effects are not always good.’
1762 The formerly autonomous management of the French military corps,
previously known for their respective esprit du corps, is centralised by
the royal administration.
1764 The Jesuits are banned from France, after a long public campaign in
which their esprit de corps was often attacked.
1765 The Parlement of Metz addresses a remonstrance to the King of
France calling for a grand national esprit de corps, also called l’esprit
de patriotisme.
1776 In the Wealth of Nations, the Scottish philosopher and economist
Adam Smith criticises the ‘corporation spirit’, leading ‘every man to
consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself
is allowed to neglect his own’.
Esprit de Corps: A Timeline ix
1776 The French minister Turgot attempts to eradicate the corporations and
their esprit de corps in the name of economic laissez-faire.
1779 In Calcutta, a local petition is signed by British inhabitants against
the ‘esprit de corps of the Professors of Law’.
1782 The Parisian author Louis-Sébastien Mercier predicts that the indi-
vidualistic dissolution of esprit de corps in labour guilds might lead to
a revolution.
1787 Mirabeau criticises ‘the esprit de corps of the orders of the state that
support despotism’.
1787 In America, the convention led by George Washington and the
Founding Fathers debates the pros and cons of esprit de corps.
1789 Several French revolutionaries, one of whom is the Abbé Sieyès, call
for a national esprit de corps to achieve the ‘adunation’ of France,
against particular and local forms of esprit de corps.
1789 In the UK, Jeremy Bentham defines esprit de corps as ‘professional
zeal’.
1791 In Revolutionary France, the Le Chapelier law criminalises profes-
sional esprit de corps and proclaims that free trade and free working
are the new economic standard: ‘There are no longer corporations in
the state, there is only the particular interest of each individual and
then the general interest.’
1793 The French minister of war Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte strives to ‘anni-
hilate the esprit de corps’ in military regiments and replace it with a
unified army of citizens.
1793 In his Königsberg Lectures, Immanuel Kant violently criticises ‘sepa-
ratists and sectarians of every kind’ and their immoral esprit de corps.
1793 A democratic reform to reduce the esprit de corps in British politics,
inspired by the French Revolution, is officially discussed in the House
of Commons.
1800 Napoleon and his minister of foreign affairs Talleyrand work on the
organisation of a national programme of administrative esprit de
corps, founded on several grands corps d’État.
1803 In France, the idea of esprit de corps is popular anew among the elites.
Reversing the claims of the Enlightenment, Chateaubriand writes:
‘Esprit de corps, which can be bad in the whole, is always good in the
part.’
1803 US President Thomas Jefferson calls for less esprit de corps in the
leadership of banks, via a frequent rotation of directors.
1805 Napoleon calls corps enseignant the national corporation of teachers
and declares that the former esprit de corps of the Jesuits is a model to
be revived in education: ‘If we do not learn from childhood whether
to be republican or monarchical, Catholic or irreligious, etc., the
State will not form a nation.’
1808 The utopianist Charles Fourier theorises that ‘esprit de corps is enough
to eradicate the most shocking vices of the civilized populace’.
